At about half-past eleven, an Irish drunk called Johnny stumbles in. He comes to see us about three times a week, and his visits have become choreographed and scripted routines that neither he nor I would want to change. In a hostile and unpredictable world, we rely on each other to provide something to count on.

“Fuck off, Johnny,” I tell him.

“So my money’s no good to you?” he says.

“You haven’t got any money. And we haven’t got anything that you want to buy.”

This is his cue to launch into an enthusiastic rendition of Dana’s ‘All Kinds of Everything,’ which is my cue to come out from behind the counter and lead him back toward the door, which is his cue to hurl himself at one of the browser racks, which is my cue to open the door, loosen his grip on the rack with the other, and push. We devised these moves a couple of years ago, so we’ve got them off pat now.

Johnny is our only prelunch customer. This isn’t a job for the wildly ambitious.

Barry doesn’t show up until after lunch, which isn’t unusual. Both Dick and Barry were employed to work part-time, three days each, but shortly after I’d taken them on they both started turning up every day, including Saturdays. I didn’t know what to do about it—if they really had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, I didn’t want to, you know, draw attention to it, in case it prompted some sort of spiritual crisis—so I upped their money a bit and left it at that. Barry interpreted the pay rise as a signal to cut his hours back, so I haven’t given him one since. That was four years ago, and he’s never said anything about it.

He comes into the shop humming a Clash riff. Actually, ‘humming’ is the wrong word: he’s making that guitar noise that all little boys make, the one where you stick your lips out, clench your teeth and go ‘DA-DA!’ Barry is thirty-three years old.

“Awlright boys? Hey, Dick, what’s this music, man? It stinks.” He makes a face and holds his nose. “Phwooar.”

Barry intimidates Dick, to the extent that Dick rarely says a word when Barry is in the shop. I only get involved when Barry is being really offensive, so I just watch Dick reach for the hi-fi on the shelf above the counter and turn the cassette off.

“Thank fuck for that. You’re like a child, Dick. You need watching all the time. I don’t know why I should have to do it all, though. Rob, didn’t you notice what he was putting on? What are you playing at, man?”

He talks relentlessly, and more or less everything he says is gibberish. He talks a lot about music, but also a lot about books (Terry Pratchett and anything else which features monsters, planets, and so on), and films, and women. Pop, girls, etc., as the Liquorice Comfits said. But his conversation is simply enumeration: if he has seen a good film, he will not describe the plot, or how it made him feel, but where it ranks in his best-of-year list, his best-of-all-time list, his best-of-decade list—he thinks and talks in tens and fives, and as a consequence, Dick and I do too. And he makes us write lists as well, all the time: “OK, guys. Top five Dustin Hoffman films.” Or guitar solos, or records made by blind musicians, or Gerry and Sylvia Anderson shows (“I don’t believe you’ve got Captain Scarlet at number one, Dick. The guy was immortal! What’s fun about that?”), or sweets that come in jars (“If either of you have got Rhubarb and Custard in the top five, I’m resigning now.”).

Barry puts his hand into his leather jacket pocket, produces a tape, puts it in the machine, and jacks up the volume. Within seconds the shop is shaking to the bass line of ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ by Katrina and the Waves. It’s February. It’s cold. It’s wet. Laura has gone. I don’t want to hear ‘Walking on Sunshine.’ Somehow it doesn’t fit my mood.

“Turn it off, Barry.” I have to shout, like a lifeboat captain in a gale.

“It won’t go up any more.”

“I didn’t say ‘up,’ you fuckwit. I said ‘off.’ ”

He laughs, and walks through into the stockroom, shouting out the horn parts: “Da DA! da da da da da-da da-da-da-da.” I turn it off myself, and Barry comes back into the shop.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t want to hear ‘Walking on Sunshine’!”

“That’s my new tape. My Monday morning tape. I made it last night, specially.”

“Yeah, well, it’s fucking Monday afternoon. You should get out of bed earlier.”

“And you’d have let me play it this morning, would you?”

“No. But at least this way I’ve got an excuse.”

“Don’t you want something to cheer you up? Bring a bit of warmth to your miserable middle-aged bones?”

“Nope.”

“What do you want to hear when you’re pissed off then?”

“I don’t know. Not ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ for a start.”

“OK, I’ll wind it on.”

“What’s next?”

“ ‘Little Latin Lupe Lu.’ ”

I groan.

“Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels?” Dick asks.

“No. The Righteous Brothers.” You can hear the defensiveness in Barry’s voice. He has obviously never heard the Mitch Ryder version.

“Oh. Oh well. Never mind.” Dick would never go so far as to tell Barry that he’s messed up, but the implication is clear.

“What?” says Barry, bristling.

“Nothing.”

“No, come on. What’s wrong with the Righteous Brothers?”

“Nothing. I just prefer the other one,” says Dick mildly.

“Bollocks.”

“How can it be bollocks to state a preference?” I ask.

“If it’s the wrong preference, it’s bollocks.”

Dick shrugs and smiles.

“What? What? What’s that smug smile for?”

“Leave him alone, Barry. It doesn’t matter. We’re not listening to fucking ‘Little Latin Lupe Lu’ anyway, so give it a rest.”

“Since when did this shop become a fascist regime?”

“Since you brought that terrible tape in.”

“All I’m trying to do is cheer us up. That’s all. Very sorry. Go and put some old sad bastard music on, see if I care.”

“I don’t want old sad bastard music on either. I just want something I can ignore.”

“Great. That’s the fun thing about working in a record shop, isn’t it? Playing things that you don’t want to listen to. I thought this tape was going to be, you know, a talking point. I was going to ask you for your top five records to play on a wet Monday morning and all that, and you’ve gone and ruined it.”

“We’ll do it next Monday.”

“What’s the point of that?”

And so on, and on, probably for the rest of my working life.

I’d like to do a top five records that make you feel nothing at all; that way, Dick and Barry would be doing me a favor. Me, I’ll be playing the Beatles when I get home. Abbey Road, probably, although I’ll program the CD to skip over “Something.” The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing ‘Yellow Submarine’ at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they’ll make me feel something, they won’t make me feel anything bad.